Hacker News Reader

Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

That would make Brexit even more of a tragic joke than it already is. Norway was the prime example of how countries thrive outside the EU. When endlessly deliberating on what kind of relationship Britain wants with the EU, "Norway+" was one of the nauseatingly-often repeated chants, only to be discarded for something far looser.

And now the "Norway+" OG wants in... maybe.

View on HN

Norway+ never made any sense because Norway is a pure rule-taker. To gain access to the EU market, it adopts all EU legislation but gets no say in how it’s written.

So the plus sign was always doing an awful lot of work. Presumably it meant that Britain wouldn’t be a rule-taker but somehow would still get the benefits of a pseudo-membership like Norway does. The problem there was that nobody could explain how this would have been better than the special rules EU membership that the UK already had negotiated over decades.

EU parliament is mostly empty during sessions and laws are written by lobbyists. Nothing stops Norway and UK from lobbying. Buying eastern European deputy for them is pennies. Only poor states benefit from full membership.

Poor states are exploited. EU benefits mostly Germany and France.

That's a new one. Both these countries are net payers.

That's the old one. Read the sibling comment.

This one you mean?

Politicians and oligarchs of poor EU states intercept all EU funding and defraud the funding. Most ordinary folks get nothing, pay high taxes, see everywhere "funded by EU" and wonder "where all my taxes go?!". Without EU poor states can create Slavosphere or Balkanosphere. Their politicians with oligarchs will go full Belarus or even start wars again.

Still FR and DE are net payers, no matter where the money goes so why saying that they benefit the most?

Well, whatever about France, Germany benefit massively from being in a currency union with less strong currencies. If the DM still existed, it would be priced like the Swiss Franc and a lot of manufacturers in Germany would be unable to compete.

Slowly Germany is appearing unable to compete without Russian resources. Not even undervalued euro is enough. An open secret obvious to everyone yet their politicians until 2022 had been claiming with poker face that's all hard work and pure business.

I honestly don't think that's true. Yes, they need cheaper energy for some industries (cheap energy is almost always useful), but they're still doing well.

Now that they've (finally) accepted that the debt brake was a terrible idea, I'd expect them to return to growth (and indeed their precision manufacturing is gonna be helpful in this turn towards defence spending).

> Poor states are exploited.

There’s also a remarkable cognitive dissonance thinking that the EU would “accept” being dumped (very publicly and dramatically, with many instances of name calling), followed by having their old partner crawling back asking for an open relationship, because “but Norway+”.

Norway wasn’t a founding member. Norway never fully joined and then partially pulled out.

I really hope the UK rejoins eventually, but I will never support them having the prime position they used to enjoy.

"gets no say in how it’s written" ... well this is the same case for member countries (they also have only few things to say), and was one of the reasons for Brexit.

Pre-Brexit Britain was the driver for big chunks of EU legislation like the financial services framework.

Obviously you don’t get to write every law to your liking, but Britain certainly wasn’t lacking in influence. They mostly did a good job of picking their battles, but couldn’t make that case to their own voters (many of whom just didn’t care about things like Britain’s finance leadership, of course).

err, no, that's just the usual nonsense people who both don't like the EU and also don't understand it

Aren’t there still some very significant barriers at least for food imports from the EU? They wouldn’t be possible with full membership.

Of course the overwhelming majority of Norwegians might not mind lower prices that much..

Food and beverages have barriers since the EU subsidises those inside the free market. In turn that also causes Norwegian food prices to be massively inflated compared to its EU's peers (like Sweden and Denmark).

When traveling to Norway I notice a lot how the food is both lower quality (in taste, not in safety) while being quite a bit more expensive than in Sweden.

The major political block hanging over Norway's EU ascension are fisheries and agriculture since those industries don't know how they would compete against cheaper EU products.

> When traveling to Norway I notice a lot how the food is both lower quality (in taste, not in safety

Maybe this is because food was never a cultural thing (as opposed to France, Italy, ...)?

> Maybe this is because food was never a cultural thing (as opposed to France, Italy, ...)?

Food not a cultural thing? Food defines cultures my friend.

What I meant is that this is maybe not such a key part of the culture as it is in another countries.

Many things define culture, and their impact varies from culture to culture.

Bluntly the issue with Brexit is that the UK had no plan and still has no plan.

In any case, it will take a long time to adapt but at least the country should have a plan to make the most of it and invest over the long term in that plan. Instead they've just only tried to minimise change and to stay as aligned on the EU as possible.

It's not a comment for or against Brexit, it's just an observation that it is really a "go for it or don't do it" situation.

Note, too, that one of the key measure that people wanted out of Brexit was to end free movement. If you end free movement there is not many options because that means you are firmly outside of the common market. Norway has free movement, and even Switzerland has. Considering the absolute shamble that is immigration policy in Europe, and still is in the UK, I can't see things evolving towards "rejoining" any time soon.

That was always the argument for Brexit: removing constraints allows you to move to a better local optimum - and for the right price it is worth it. Mathematically, this is undeniably true.

The counterargument was that the new optimum isn't much better, the price is too high, and arguably even the UK will not be able to manoeuvre itself to that new optimum (like, execute better trade deals, or replace wonky regulation with less wonky ones).

So I guess you are saying (?) Brexit is still a net positive because the potential upside is still there. People like me say that upside is not actually realizable under real world conditions - and so far that seems to hold. You mention free movement, and if anything, UK immigration is more shambolic, not less, compared to pre-Brexit.

I guess it is hard to know. Is colonising Mars merely an engineering problem or major challenge to science? I guess either, depending on how you look at it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com